Every content marketing strategy is unique. But the idea, goals, and techniques behind content marketing strategies remain the same.

And we wanted to see what a successful content marketing strategy looks like in action. So we asked Marketing Experts to share their techniques and success stories. Keep reading to learn how they’ve created success with content marketing.

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Repurposing Content Across Different Platforms

Spreading your content doesn’t stop with social promotion and SEO. So what’s the next frontier? It’s online publishing platforms.

These are publishing platforms like Medium, LinkedIn, or Inbound. They’re similar to social media because they open up your content to huge audiences. But what makes these platforms unique is that users can read your content on the platform itself.

I recently shut down my old blog and started a brand new one 6 months ago with the focus being heavy on content marketing. Although I don’t have a lot of articles published, the results have been pretty amazing.

My average shares per article have tripled, I’m earning a lot more backlinks (which is helping my rankings) and my subscriber numbers are doubling daily.

The reason for this?

Repurposing every piece of content I wrote onto different platforms. Whether it’s creating a video, making an Infographic or a SlideShare presentation, doing just that has increased my exposure.

On my old site, I would just publish content and really just leave it. But since I started my new site, I make sure to put in the effort to be more out there so people see my content.

Nurturing your Leads

Content marketing is about providing value. And through this value, you’ll generate customers.

So what does this look like in practice? The starting point is getting visitors on your site. A great way to do this is through blog posts. They let you target specific keywords your potential customers are searching for. Start by publishing content on these topics.

From there, you can create downloads, like checklists or industry reports, to nurture your visitors. At this point, you can ask your visitors for their email. If your content is valuable, they’ll gladly subscribe.

Now comes the fun part. Using email you can send visitors targeted content. It’s a direct line of communication to your potential customers. This stage also offers you the opportunity to promote your products.

I’ve done pretty much everything when it comes to content marketing. I’ve written close to 1,000 blog posts on my niche, which is audio production, in the last 7 years.

I drive traffic through long informative content that’s found on Google. I collect leads to my email list by giving away free PDFs that solve some of my audience’s burning problems. Then, I create content through email marketing, giving them continued value and solutions to their problems while occasionally pitching my premium products to them which generates revenue.

I’ve actually started writing a weekly newsletter called 10Weekly about the various tips for entrepreneurs I’ve learned throughout the years.

Research-Backed Infographics

Infographics aren’t a new content marketing technique. But crafting an infographic is still powerful for delivering on content marketing goals – like driving traffic and generating leads.

So what’s the secret? It revolves around relevance and research. First, learn your industry’s interests. What do they want to read or learn? From there, you have to put in the research. This means developing factual data. Then make recommendations and predictions audiences will listen to.

Going into 2017, one of our goals was to feature our thought leadership on top marketing publications. It was crucial to create original, newsworthy content that would both gain the attention of top publications, and add fresh ideas to the industry.

For the past several years, there’s been a lot of buzz about “millennials” but not much insight on what generations are yet to come. We wanted to learn more about this emerging group and how marketers can prepare to engage with this generation.

So we created an infographic using insights on “Generation Alpha” and pitched it out to top marketing publications. The infographic was picked up by CMO.com, one of our target publications, reaching an audience over 500,000 strong.

Crafting Content For Buyer Personas

There’s a lot of content out there today. Yet a majority of it goes to waste.

But you can get around this. The trick is to understand who your reader is and deliver on their needs.

This is where buyer personas come into play. Buyer personas have stood the test of time for a reason – they work. Sure you can write content, but when you’re not targeting that content for an ideal reader, no one will value it.

We’ve been doing content marketing for about 3 years now. The results have been amazing. Some of our articles have gone viral, helping us establish online authority within our niche and increasing our monthly traffic.

Through blogging, our creative team is able to write about a variety of topics, targeted toward our different audiences. This engages a wide base of potential customers and gives them access to our brand and services. This also gives us an SEO boost and helps to cement the credibility of our site.

In order to create content that people will love, you need to first create Buyer Persona Profiles. That will allow you to segment all the different potential and profitable buyers.

Then, do some research on the things that are important for them. Their challenges and motivations are a great source of inspiration for content creation.

Last but not least, make sure you have an editorial calendar in place. Consistency is key if you want to establish yourself as an authority.

Sharing Knowledge to Develop Relationships

A content marketing strategy is a long-term game. Techniques like blogging, video marketing, and social media take commitment.

So at the end of the day, what’s it all for? It’s about your customer. You have to develop a relationship with your potential customers for long-term success.

If you implement content marketing right, you customers will support you. They want to do business with someone they trust.

We base our marketing strategy on free, downloadable guides and factsheets. These generate the majority of our leads.

People want to be smarter and inform themselves. If you can help them, it’s the beginning of a potential relationship.

The first thing we did to launch our site was partner with a well-known newspaper columnist to create an in-depth guide, free to download. Also whenever we do something new or interesting we’ll create a free report so users can read about it offline.

Why is this a great business strategy? First, information resources are invaluable for warming up a lead. The client feels further along the decision trail. Either they know enough to decide – or to ask an informed question that gets us talking to them.

Second, they’re arguably necessary for high value, long lead time business. If you don’t provide helpful and actionable information, they may well find it from your competitor.

By the way – information products don’t have to be encyclopedic. In fact, we’ve often found the shorter the better.

Producing Content Consistently

One problem with professional blogs is consistency. It’s tough generating content on a regular basis. From idea generation to writing to promotion.

But to succeed with content marketing, consistency is key. It shows customers you’re an active member in your industry. It also improves your site’s visibility over time through SEO and social promotion.

Particularly in the B2B space, consistently producing high-quality educational content provides an opportunity to help your prospects both solve problems and answer questions, while also showcasing your company’s unique expertise. Much of the strategy and work we carry out for clients revolves around content marketing, but a couple years ago, I admit we really weren’t producing the same level of output for our own brand.

Recognizing the importance of this opportunity, our inbound marketing agency capitalized on the number of subject matter experts we have on the team. In April 2015, we increased our blogging efforts and began publishing about 3 posts per week, with full team participation. Since then, we’ve increased blog subscribers by 4,300%, monthly blog post views by 163%, organic traffic by 182%, and visit-to-lead conversions via organic search by 259%. Perhaps most importantly, many of the leads we’re generating are much more qualified to buy and in line with our target markets.

Of course, to convert visitors into prospects, we’ve also published a wide range of downloadable content gated behind lead gen landing pages-21 offers ranging from webinars and guides to eBooks and checklists. Although there are a number of sources we leverage to drive visits to these pages, our analytics have repeatedly shown that many of our top performing website entry pages that ultimately lead to conversions are, in fact, blog posts. The goal is to connect our blog content to relevant resources on our site so that everything we produce seamlessly works together; there’s always a logical next step for the reader. Embracing blogging as a team has clearly had a substantial impact on our lead generation, visitor engagement and branding efforts.

Content Marketing Strategy Examples From Marketing Pros

A content marketing strategy is unique for every business. But there are similarities for delivering on business goals, like driving site traffic and generating leads.

What also remains constant is the commitment we’ve seen across the board. From reading our expert contributions, it’s clear content marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. Content marketing strategies call for time, effort, and refinement.

4 Comments

Thanks for sharing some great insights in your post well I have some issues regarding my website content and SMO content. it seems like everyone has a list of “secrets for Content marketing.” At this point, you may be asking yourself, “Where do I even begin?” I think I have to rethink my strategy after reading your information. Your information helps me a lot keep doing this.

Andrew’s content marketing example hits home the most. I find myself reading most of my content on medium or tumblr. They let me preview content and save me time from visiting a site and leaving. I’ll have to check out inbound as well. I quickly visited the site but I’m going to look into it more.

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